'D.o.a.' Goes A Long Way On Its Looks Excitement Is All Visual In This Improbable Thriller

March 21, 1988|By Jay Boyar, Sentinel Movie Critic

Visually speaking, this already has been a fairly lively year at the movies. Moonstruck and The Last Emperor, both of which opened locally in 1988, have some fascinating sequences to look at. So do Masquerade, Barfly and Hairspray.

But the most visually dynamic movie to open this year arrived Friday. For sheer, eye-popping audacity, D.O.A. blows the rest away.

The fast-paced thriller was directed by the British team that developed the Max Headroom character, one of modern television's most visually exciting creations. In D.O.A., directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel go beyond the glitz of Headroom, heightening the visual experience as they bring their dazzling technique to the big screen.

Working with Russian-born cinematographer Yuri Neyman, the directors display a knack for placing the camera in unlikely places, deliberately creating a feeling of what a film professor might call existential malaise. And working with editor Michael R. Miller (whose previous achievements include Raising Arizona and Blood Simple, the supercharged films of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen), the directors show an amazing felicity when it comes to playing with pace.

They let their camera swoop and glide, vary the speed of the image flow, and paint the picture with harrowing shadows. (They also do brilliant things with the movie's sound, creating a rounded aural ambiance for their characters to speak and move within.) What they're really doing is presenting bits and pieces of action, which we reassemble in our minds, almost as if we were dreaming.

Had the script come close to the camerawork's sophistication, we'd be talking bona fide masterpiece. But D.O.A. has a narrative structure that's much more complex than it needs to be and much less clever than it ought to have been. The dialogue, by Charles Edward Pogue (who wrote the 1986 remake of The Fly), is intermittently witty, but the story, by Pogue, Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, is a mess.

The narrative is especially weakened by improbabilities and glaring expediencies. Intent on keeping a man and a woman together for a while, the storytellers crazily have the man cover his hand with some sort of superglue and grab the woman's arm. In a later scene, after they're detached, the woman blithely goes to a carnival about an hour after narrowly escaping death. As if that were not unlikely enough, at the carnival she just happens to re- encounter the man who'd been stuck to her. (Somehow, this sort of thing works better with a sci-fi property, like Max Headroom, than it does in a film noir context.)

Its visual distinction notwithstanding, D.O.A. might have been just about incomprehensible were there not a powerful gimmick at the center of the story: A man has ingested a slow-acting poison and has only a day (or two) to find his killer. When nothing else in D.O.A. makes much sense, this premise (borrowed from the 1949 film of the same name) has an urgency that keeps the story from completely crumbling.

Dennis Quaid (The Big Easy, Innerspace) stars as Dexter Cornell, a burnt- out college professor (and blocked novelist) who discovers how precious life is only after being poisoned.

Meg Ryan, who worked with Quaid in Innerspace, plays Sydney Fuller, a student with a crush on Dexter. (The effervescent Sydney keeps Diet Sprite in her refrigerator and is, herself, a sort of sprite.)

Quaid and Ryan make a nice team: Her neo-Goldie Hawn vivacity balances his neo-Jack Nicholson sourness. Offering much support are Daniel Stern (Born in East L.A.) as Dexter's college colleague, Charlotte Rampling (Angel Heart) as a rich widow and Jane Kaczmarek (Falling In Love) as Dexter's estranged wife. Kaczmarek in particular has a way of bringing a scene to life with her offbeat timing and expressive eyes.

But when D.O.A. is over, what you're left with isn't eyes or performances or themes or anything like that.

You remember the flash of images as a man is pushed toward a whirling blade. You remember the hesitation of the visual flow as he stumbles, battered and bleary, from tar pit to carnival. You remember a slo-mo crash through a window, and the glimmer of the glass shards as they dance about the crashing form.